One would plead for [Somalis] the right to achieve those natural aspirations for freedom, education and progress, which large numbers of them have conceived despite the limitations of a hard, nomadic existence in waterless, scrublands, despite enslavement to forced labour in the fertile, river-irrigated regions seized by the foreigner, in abject political and economic subjection to alien invaders for half a century. Freedom for them, as for all people, must mean release from the position of an inferior race dominated by a foreign power.